Hanoi boosts administrative reforms to support businesses

Administrative procedures will continue to be reformed while more convenient services for enterprises will be developed in Hanoi to help improve the business climate and competitiveness of the capital city, said the municipal Department of Planning and Investment (DPI).

The city held a meeting on July 4 to look into convenient services that can assist companies with business registration.

Pham Thi Kim Tuyen, head of the DPI’s business registration division, said in the first six months of 2018, Hanoi granted business registration certificates to nearly 12,500 new firms with a total capital of more than 140 trillion VND (over 6 billion USD), down 0.2 percent in volume but up 50 percent in capital.

At the meeting

Nearly 84,000 administrative dossiers were handled, up 10.6 percent from the same period last year. Notably, 100 percent of business registration dossiers were submitted online.

She added that previously, it took businesses nine days to complete administrative procedures before starting operations. Since the beginning of this year, the DPI has been providing convenient services to support business registration on its portal, thus cutting down the time needed to complete those procedures to six days.

It has helped save time and money for businesses and reduce the workload for the DPI’s staff, Tuyen said.

Those services are provided in coordination with the Hanoi Post and nine domestic commercial banks.

Nguyen Anh Tuan, Director of the Bizconsult law firm, believes that building convenient services to help with business registration is an achievement, as well as an inevitable move in the digital era. They create a business climate where service providers, consultancies, and enterprises assist one another, thereby helping to reduce personnel, time, and costs for businesses.

He asked the DPI to increase introducing services of foreign banks to companies so as to diversify services and ensure equality between businesses and banks.

At the meeting, the DPI said it is going to push forward with administrative reforms, especially business registration procedures. It will put into use the service of making appointments via telephone, as well as the SMS-sending service to update firms about the settlement status of their dossiers. It will also manage business registration dossiers via barcodes to keep a close watch on its employees’ work and the status of dossiers.

Meanwhile, organisations and citizens can give feedback on the working quality and attitude of the DPI’s staff through either its portal or feedback notes at its single-window section. The department also promised to regularly monitor and assess employees’ sense of responsibility, discipline, and activeness in their work, it added.